As the morning mist lifted off the southern reach of the Silver River where the channel widened into the vast Silver Lake, the sound of iron chains clanking echoed across the water.
Fifty towering Iron-Beak Ramming Warships—the ultimate trump card that Guild Master Qian had spent twenty years and three million taels of silver building—sailed out of the lake mouth in a tight wedge formation.
Unlike the wooden galleys from the night before, each of these fifty warships was a hundred feet long, reinforced from the waterline down with thick black pig-iron plates, and tipped with a ten-ton cast-iron ram shaped like a snapping crocodile jaw!
Standing at the prow of the center flagship alongside Guild Master Qian were three fierce-looking cultivators wearing shark-skin vests. Every time they breathed, swirling currents of Rank 4 Early Qi Gathering energy rippled through the air around them.
They were the infamous Three River Sharks—Shark-Tooth Zhang, Whirlpool Li, and Eel-Skin Wang—three rogue Qi Gathering cultivators whom Guild Master Qian paid fifty thousand silver taels a year to guard his secret treasury!
Below them, crouching beside fifty underwater trapdoors built into the bottom bilge-decks of the warships, were two hundred Rank 3 Deep-Water Martial Divers. Each diver had oiled skin, held a lung-breathing reed bladder in his teeth, and gripped a heavy spiral iron drill designed to bore holes through enemy ship hulls from underneath!
“Look at my fifty Iron-Beak Warships, Brother Zhang!” Guild Master Qian shouted, his confidence roaring back as he patted the iron railing of his flagship. “Their hulls are plated with solid pig-iron underneath! Soap bubbles can’t sink them, and once our two hundred Rank 3 Martial Divers swim underwater and drill fifty holes into the bottoms of Pei Xuan’s ten steamboats, his whole fleet will sink to the mud in five minutes!”
Shark-Tooth Zhang grinned, showing a row of filed, pointed teeth as he patted the Rank 4 Water-Splitting Harpoon strapped to his back.
“Rest easy, Guild Master Qian! For an extra ten thousand taels and five hundred Spirit Stones, my two brothers and I will personally dive under that lead iron boat, rip off its paddle-wheels with our bare hands, and drag that little desert boy out by his ankles!”
Three hundred yards upstream, on the bridge of Dry-Well No. 1, Pei Xuan looked at the fifty approaching Iron-Beak Warships through his water mirror while Abacus Su clutched his chest in agony.
“My Lord! Please look at those fifty warships!” Abacus Su cried out, his eyes shining with greedy tears behind his brass spectacles. “Each of those ships has four tons of forged pig-iron bolted to its keel and fifty tons of prime oak timbers! That’s two hundred tons of refined iron and half a million silver taels worth of warships! If Inspector Ye cuts them in half, or if Boom-Pot Sun blows holes in their bottoms, I won’t be able to sleep for a month!”
Ye Guhan, who was just resting his thumb on the hilt of his black-iron sword on the foredeck, paused and frowned. “You don’t want me to cut them?”
“No cutting! Not a single scratch on my future cargo fleet!” Abacus Su begged, bowing repeatedly to Ye Guhan before turning to Pei Xuan. “My Lord, is there any way we can make all fifty crews hand over those Iron-Beak Warships completely intact, without denting a single iron plate?”
“Capture fifty heavily armored warships, three Rank 4 Qi Gathering mercenaries, and two hundred underwater divers without scratching the paint?” Pei Xuan rubbed his chin and laughed. “Actually, since Guild Master Qian was so kind as to plate the bottoms of all fifty of his ships with solid pig-iron... he just gave us the easiest targets in the world!”
Pei Xuan turned to Boom-Pot Sun, who was standing beside three big baskets on the deck.
“Master Sun, did you bring the failed batch of Digestion-Clearing Pills that you accidentally brewed at the Vocational College last Tuesday?”
Boom-Pot Sun blushed slightly behind his soot-stained beard and rubbed the back of his head. “Hehehe! You mean my Nine-Turn Peach-Blossom Laxative Smoke Balls, My Lord? I only meant to make a mild stomach-settling tea for Elder Huo, using wild river rhubarb, castor oil beans, and fermented honey-plums... Who knew that when the cauldron overheated, the smoke drifted out the window and made fifty Vocational College students fight over the three campus toilets for six hours straight?!”
Behind him, down by the boiler room hatch, Elder Huo shuddered violently at the memory. “Don’t open that basket near the air vents, you monster! Just smelling that pink smoke makes my bowels tie themselves into knots!”
Pei Xuan grinned and pointed at the three baskets on the deck: fifty chunks of natural Black-Rock Loadstone from the desert mines, five hundred fat Black-Stripe Sucking River Leeches scooped out of the canal reeds, and five hundred of Boom-Pot Sun’s Pink Laxative Smoke Balls.
“System!” Pei Xuan commanded inside his mind. “Open the Fusion Cube! Combine [50 Black-Rock Loadstones] + [500 Sucking River Leeches] + [500 Boom-Pot Sun Laxative Smoke Balls]. Spend 500,000 Loyalty Points!”
HUMMMMM—DING!
Fifty shiny black iron spheres with wriggling iron-rubber tails materialized on the foredeck of Dry-Well No. 1. They looked like fifty oversized iron tadpoles, clicking their magnetic suction mouths eagerly as they smelled the two hundred tons of pig-iron on Guild Master Qian’s warships downstream!
“General Tie!” Pei Xuan pointed toward the river. “Toss our little iron tadpoles into the water! And have Old Boatman Liu tow out the ten Floating Public Restroom Barges we built for the dockworkers!”
“Haha! In you go, little buddies!”
General Tie Zhan and ten Furnace-Blood soldiers grabbed the fifty Magnetic Leech-Mines and tossed them over the side railing into the Silver River.
Plop! Plop! Plop!
The moment the fifty black spheres hit the water, they didn’t sink to the mud. Their flexible iron tails whipped back and forth like high-speed propellers, and all fifty mines shot underwater in a silent V-formation straight toward the fifty Iron-Beak Ramming Warships!
Meanwhile, aboard the fifty Guild warships, Guild Master Qian raised his arm to order the final ramming charge.
“Release the two hundred Deep-Water Divers from the bottom hatches! Ramming speed—full oars!”
Down in the dark, smelly bottom bilge-rooms of all fifty warships, two hundred Rank 3 Martial Divers greased with fish oil put their breathing reeds in their mouths and pushed open the underwater iron trapdoors in the floors of the hulls.
“Time to drill some holes in those desert boats—” the lead diver in the flagship’s bilge-room muttered as he stuck his head down toward the open water hatch.
ZOOM—CLANK!
A basketball-sized black iron sphere shot up out of the murky river water and clamped its magnetic suction mouth directly over the iron rim of the bottom hatch—pinning the lead diver’s nose half an inch from its brass nozzle!
CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!
In the exact same second, beneath all fifty Iron-Beak Warships, fifty Magnetic Leech-Mines locked onto the pig-iron hull plates and bilge air-vents with five thousand pounds of magnetic attraction!
“What is this round iron thing stuck to the hatch?!” the lead diver yelled, grabbing a crowbar and trying to pry the magnetic leech-mine off the iron rim. “It won’t budge! Wait—why is its mouth puffing up?!”
PFFT—HISSSSSSSSSSS!
All fifty Magnetic Leech-Mines popped open their internal pressure valves at once!
Thick, billowy clouds of sweet-smelling Pink Peach-Blossom Smoke blasted straight up through the open diver hatches, bilge grates, and floor planks of all fifty Iron-Beak Warships!
In less than five seconds, every cabin, oar-deck, and upper command bridge of Guild Master Qian’s elite fleet was wrapped in a romantic, rosy pink cloud that smelled like ripe honey-plums!
Up on the flagship’s bow, Shark-Tooth Zhang sniffed the pink mist and laughed scornfully, wrapping a layer of Rank 4 Water Qi around his chest.
“Ha! A mere smoke screen? And it smells like sweet peaches! Does Pei Xuan think he can perfume us to death? Watch me blow this pink fog away—”
Shark-Tooth Zhang took a deep breath to shout a Qi wave.
A mouthful of sweet pink gas bypassed his external Qi shield and went straight down his windpipe into his stomach.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Then, deep inside Shark-Tooth Zhang’s abdomen, a sound louder than a steamship boiler echoed across the quiet morning river:
GRUUUUUUUUMBLE—GURGLE—SQUEAK!
Shark-Tooth Zhang’s fierce, shark-like face turned from bronze to chalk-white, and then from chalk-white to bright green!
His knees slammed together so hard his kneecaps cracked, both hands flew back to clamp painfully over his backside, and cold sweat burst out of every pore on his forehead!
“O-oh no...” Shark-Tooth Zhang squeaked in a voice three octaves higher than normal, dropping his Rank 4 Water-Splitting Harpoon on the deck. “My stomach! What was in that peach smoke?! It feels like ten thousand angry river crabs are churning butter inside my intestines!”
GRUUUUUMBLE! GURGLE! BUBBLE!
It wasn’t just Shark-Tooth Zhang!
Beside him, Whirlpool Li and Eel-Skin Wang both dropped to their knees, clutching their bellies and curling up like boiled shrimp!
Down below decks, all two hundred Rank 3 Deep-Water Divers and two thousand warship oarsmen dropped their iron drills and wooden oars at the exact same moment!
“Where is the toilet?! Out of the way! I’m gonna explode!”
“There ARE no toilets on these warships! Guild Master Qian said building latrines wasted cargo space and told us to just hang our butts over the side railing!”
“Run to the side railings! Hurry!”
Two thousand two hundred desperate pirates, divers, and Qi Gathering mercenaries waddled frantically toward the side railings of the fifty warships like penguins with their ankles tied together!
CRASH! BUMP! THUD!
There were fifty men per side on each ship, and only enough railing space for ten backsides at a time! Worse yet, Guild Master Qian had bolted high iron arrow-shields along the railings, leaving only tiny four-inch spy-holes!
“Get off the railing, Captain Zhang! You’re blocking the only open hole!”
“If I let go of my trousers for one second, the whole deck is doomed!” Shark-Tooth Zhang wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks as his stomach let out another terrifying GURGLE-BOOM! “Guild Master Qian! Why didn’t you build toilets on your warships?! I’m a dignified Rank 4 Immortal Cultivator—I cannot disgrace myself in my own shark-skin pants in front of a hundred thousand townspeople!”
Just as the entire fifty-ship armada was one breath away from the greatest sanitary disaster in naval history, a gentle, soothing voice floated across the water from the brass loudspeakers of Dry-Well No. 1:
“ATTENTION ALL SAILORS AND CULTIVATORS OF THE IRON-BEAK FLEET!”
Hong Ling pointed down at ten freshly painted white barges floating fifty yards behind the steamships. Each barge had twenty neat wooden doors marked PUBLIC RESTROOM, complete with green willow plants by the entrance, flushing water pipes, and baskets of soft, three-ply mulberry paper!
“DRY-WELL CITY BELIEVES IN HUMANITARIAN TREATMENT OF ALL PRISONERS!” Hong Ling announced brightly. “WE HAVE TEN FLOATING FLUSH-TOILET BARGES RIGHT HERE, EQUIPPED WITH SOFT MULBERRY PAPER AND BOOM-POT SUN’S STOMACH-SOOTHING PEPPERMINT TEA! ANY WARSHIP THAT RAISES A WHITE FLAG OF SURRENDER AND ROWS OVER WITHIN TWO MINUTES GETS IMMEDIATE, FREE VIP TOILET ACCESS!”
On the bow of the flagship, Shark-Tooth Zhang didn’t even wait half a second.
“A white flag! Give me a white flag!” Shark-Tooth Zhang roared at the top of his lungs.
“Big Brother Zhang, all our flags are black and red!” Whirlpool Li cried, hopping from foot to foot with his hands clamped behind him.
“Then use my underpants!”
RIPPPPP!
With the desperate speed of a Rank 4 Qi Gathering master, Shark-Tooth Zhang reached inside his belt, yanked off his own white cotton boxers in a single motion, tied them to the tip of his Water-Splitting Harpoon, and leaped thirty feet up the mainmast to nail his giant white underpants to the top of the flagpole!
“WE SURRENDER! THE THREE RIVER SHARKS OFFICIALLY SURRENDER TO LORD PEI! OPEN THE TOILET DOORS! LET US THROUGH FIRST!”
RIP! RIP! FLAP! FLAP!
Across all fifty Iron-Beak Ramming Warships, two thousand sailors and divers followed Shark-Tooth Zhang’s example without a trace of hesitation! Within ten seconds, fifty pairs of white cotton underpants were fluttering proudly from the fifty mainmasts in the morning breeze as the oarsmen rowed with superhuman speed straight toward Pei Xuan’s ten Floating Restroom Barges!
Abacus Su wept with joy as he stood at the entrance of the restroom barges, stamping Debtor Contracts for the long line of desperate pirates before handing each man three sheets of soft paper and a cup of peppermint antidote tea.
“Wait—where is Guild Master Qian?!” Old Wei suddenly squinted toward the stern of the captured enemy flagship.
Pei Xuan turned his head and smiled as a splash of bubbles rose from the muddy yellow river water behind the flagship’s rudder.
“Because he was wearing airtight Rank 4 Black-Gold Turtle Armor that covered his mouth and nose when he ducked behind his chair, Guild Master Qian held his breath and jumped straight into the river to swim away underwater!” Pei Xuan chuckled, picking up a skewer of Old Guo’s grilled river shrimp. “Master Qian thinks that heavy metal turtle shell will let him crawl along the river bottom all the way to the capital? Let’s go to the bow and do a little magnet fishing!”